


Stuck On Empty

by nothing_rhymes_with_ianto



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 04:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto/pseuds/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen is dying forever now. It's like being stuck in a box, unable to do anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stuck On Empty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "quarantine" square of angst_bingo.

It isn’t so much the fact that he’s not allowed to go to work. It’s that he can’t do _anything_. He can’t sleep away the time. He can’t go out to a pub or a restaurant and drink it all away or gorge himself. He can’t even find a nice bird to spend the night with. Instead, he gets to sit and watch bad telly or pace round his flat. He’s stuck.

Which is why he goes a bit mad and screams at Tosh. And then runs into the Bay. It’s his own little breakdown, very loud and dramatic. Jack doesn’t make it any better by insulting him, though. So going on a case will help him think about something else. Which it does. And then he saves a girl, and that’s pretty damn awesome after the shitty week he’s had. So there’s that.

Then everything’s quiet and Owen is bored again like he was before. And that’s bad. He organizes his entire autopsy bay and a storage closet before Ianto gets fed up and tells him to go play stupid games on the computer. There’s nothing much else for him to do.

There’s manuals and protocols and guidebooks galore in the archives that detail how the various teams of Torchwood should deal with the death of a team member, or the resurrection of a team member, or the loss of said team member’s certain functions. But there’s nothing in all that literature that tells the team member how to cope. Owen isn’t surprised. Torchwood doesn’t think about the victims. Just the perpetrators and the team.

Ianto finishes passing out coffees and wanders into Owen’s medbay, where Owen is playing Left 4 Dead, which he thinks is amusingly ironic, even though Gwen and Tosh keep giving him strange looks. Owen glances over as Ianto flops into a chair, then kills a zombie with a shotgun and pauses the game. Ianto has an arm slung over his eyes and his suit jacket open.

“Too much paperwork?”

“It’s you,” Ianto mumbles, the curve of a smile on the edges of his mouth. “You died and then came back and did all this stupid shit and now I have to write up paperwork on everything. And I still have to catalogue all of Henry’s collection.”

“Rough.”

“I blame you,” But the tone of voice is light-hearted, and Owen gives Ianto’s foot a little kick.

“Sure you do.”

“Yep.” He sits up. “Hey, Owen?”

“Hm?”

“What’s it like?”

“What, dying?” Owen scoffs. “Did I see a white light, you mean?”

“No, what’s it like now? What’s it like to live that way?” Ianto looks at him and shrugs. “I wanted to ask Suzie, but you know.”

“Yeah.”

Owen taps his pen against the table and sighs, a reflexive action now that he doesn’t have to breathe anymore. But he likes to keep up the illusion, and it’s still automatic anyway. “It’s like being stuck in a glass box. Or having some weird invisible shield all over my body. I can see things, I can touch them and hold them, but I can’t feel them. I can’t eat or sleep or shag. I can’t smell, I can’t really taste anything, especially since seventy percent of taste is smell anyway. I can’t feel,” he holds up his bandaged hand. “Obviously.”

“And yet you’re still ticking. But when we destroyed Suzie’s glove and Jack shot her, she died. Does that mean that you could die too, since we’ve destroyed the glove that brought you back?”

“Suzie kept going when she came back. She bled when Jack shot her. I don’t bleed. I—I’ve been put on pause.”

“I’m sorry, Owen.”

Owen rolls his eyes. “Don’t apologize. It’s not your fault everything but my brain has apparently stopped working. Besides, you sound like a twat when you apologize.”

Ianto shrugs, glancing over his shoulder as Jack’s voice rings out across the Hub.

“Better go see what the boss wants. He’s probably bellowing for your arse.” Owen smirks lecherously. Ianto makes a face at him and rolls his eyes, gesturing rudely as he goes up the stairs.

Owen taps his pen again until the sound gets annoying and he drops it on the table. He _has_ stopped, and it’s a strange form of torture. He was ready to die properly when they strapped him down. He’d come to terms with everything and was ready to trust Jack and Martha with his bizarre half-life, half-death thing. And then everything went to shit. And now he’s stuck in a cage of lifeless life. There’s nothing he can do to make it better. He’s still going to be dead and completely unable to do things in the reckless manner he’s used to. He can’t go out and de-stress the way he used to and it’s painful. He can’t even sleep.

He wonders what might happen after being stuck in this weird hell for a few months, wonders if he might go mad from the stress and the inability to live. It’s like being stuck in a box, unable to do anything, unable to connect with anything or anyone in the world. He can’t live like a normal human being anymore. And he’s a doctor, he knows what happens to the mind when it doesn’t get any sleep, when it’s overloaded with stress and pain and memories and has no method of release. He hopes he won’t go mad. Because being stuck with madness in a body that cannot die would be hell. He thinks of the darkness he fell into after the glove, the loneliness, the emptiness, the fear and pain and the sensation of _things_ hiding in the dark, and hopes that’s not what’s in store for him in the future.


End file.
